Explaining The Satirical Explosion of the 1770s-1780s

   These prints are not subtle in their sexualizing of the female form, but secondary sex characteristics were not the sole focus for satirists. Caricaturists also mocked headdresses for their unnatural structures and for forcing women to sacrifice mobility or practicality for the sake of trends. Publishers accomplished this by portraying coiffures taller than the women wearing them, which supports how impractical they were. In addition to this, some pieces show women struggling to do everyday tasks like walking through doorways. These examples also begin to showcase the extreme hairstyles that were commonplace for both sexes in the late eighteenth century.³³ The 1770s proved an exceptional decade for satire around huge coiffure in English prints.

     In the early 1770s, conical shaped headdresses were a popular subject of satirical criticisms. Depictions of these ridiculous coiffures include The French Lady in London, or The Head Dress for the Year of 1771 (figure 21) and Miss Prattie Consulting Doctor Double Fee About her Pantheon Head Dress (figure 22). The sheer size of the headdresses overshadows the figures of the women. Just as other satires mock fashionable dress for creating an image of women’s bodies out of all proportion to their natural figure, these images present fashion as distorting nature in the name of uninhibited extravagance. The French Lady in London explicitly links these ridiculous fashions to the influence of the French, combining satire against fashions with anti-French sentiment.

      As the decade went on, although the shape of the wigs shifted, the size remained the same. The Extravaganza (figure 23) and Lady All Top (figure 24), both produced in 1776, show a heart shaped headdress adorned with feathers and flowers. More important than the change of shape in wigs is a shift in the satirical presentation of feathers attached to those wigs. Feathers in particular came to embody the fashionable commitment to size and spectacle over proportion and common sense. This is to say, the number of feathers portrayed increased and the size of these feathers grew compared to both the headdresses, women themselves, and their surroundings. Because the trend of large plumage came across the English Channel from France, these examples in turn satirized Francophilia in fashionable British culture.

     Figures 25 through 27 demonstrate how satires suggested that feathers specifically impeded women’s ability to engage in otherwise mundane activity. In the print The Vis-a-Vis Bisected, or the Ladies Coop (figure 25), two women are portrayed in the cross section of a carriage, also known as a “coop” in the eighteenth century. They are hunched over even while seated on the floor with little head space or room to move. Each has a significant plumage protruding from their wigs, further impeding their ability to move in the cramped carriage. Phaetona or Modern Female Taste (figure 26), produced in the same year as the Ladies Coop, is yet another example of the emphasis put on feathers in addition to the oversized headdress. Here, the plumage on the woman’s wig is larger than the horses pulling the carriage, and for that matter, the woman wearing them. The Ladies Contrivance or the Capital Concert (figure 27, 1777) applies the same trope of physical impairment as seen in The Ladies Coop. All of these examples show women in a mundane setting of travel while the proportions of the plumage impede their ability to accomplish this task.

     The most important part of these prints comes from women sacrificing mobility and comfort for the sake of fashion. The prints depict fashionable plumage as both an impediment and increasingly impractical for women. Notably, in The Ladies Contrivance, the woman is seen in comparison to her male counterpart in the background. Where her carriage has a lifted roof to account for her plumage, this is absent from the male’s carriage. A New Fashion'd Head Dress for Young Misses of Three Score and Ten (1777, figure 28), portrays a similar theme in a different way. Here two men are helping the woman fix and position her headdress. The headdress itself overshadows all the characters as it is taller than all the people when the height of the feathers is taken into account. This speaks to physical impairment because this is not something the woman could do by herself because of the massive proportions at play. A New Fashion’d Head Dress satirizes the woman’s age as well, sarcastically calling the withered crone a “young miss.” This in turn signifies this style is inappropriate for someone of her age.

      Feathers were an essential element of many fashionable coiffures, and thus they formed an equally important target for satirists. Additionally, it is important to recall that wearing extravagant plumage, especially ostrich feathers, was seen as an explicitly French fashion, so criticisms of fashionable plumage also acted as criticisms of imported French trends.³⁴ Such critiques were implicit in the prints above, where the plumage in the headdresses creates the ridiculous height and volume. In other cases, attacks focused more directly on the feathers themselves. For instance, birds seem to take the side of anti-French fashion in the print The Feather’d Fair in Fight (figure 29). The birds here are attacking the women’s large plumage, suggesting that it is unnatural as well as extravagant. This mirrors the idea that Britons should also be fighting back against “Frenchified” fashions that in turn take away from a broader British national identity.

      Ultimately, fashion in Britain was changing in both how women actually dressed and in the way such trends were perceived by people outside of the beau monde. The lack of mobility, practicality, and comfort, as well as the extravagance of fashionable dress, all came under attack. Satirists suggested that fashion contorted women into unrecognizable shapes and made it impossible for them to engage in basic tasks. The importation of trends from across the English Channel was particularly problematic. The caricatures of women’s fashionable dress came back to the same elements time and again, suggesting that these trends in particular spoke to broader cultural anxieties.

      These satirical representations elicited a humorous response in an eighteenth-century context, but to understand why, we need to examine the social, political, and economic climate of Georgian England. As we will see, three critical factors came into play. Anti-French sentiment (and its corollary, anti-Catholicism), the rise of the middle class, and concerns about women’s place in society and politics can all be tied to the satirical representations. Britain was at war with France throughout most of the eighteenth century. National propaganda portrayed France as a popish dictatorship, diametrically opposed to “free,” Protestant Britain. Women were becoming more politically active and more visible in society thanks to opportunities to engage in consumerism and sociability; they were literally as well as metaphorically taking up more space. Finally, the middle class was emerging with new economic power, but without the political power of their elite counterparts. In this context, targeting French trends, fashionable women, and the elite became particularly appealing.

      Francophobia led Britons to associate the fashionable world, which was strongly influenced by French trends, with Catholic religious beliefs. The late 1700s was a particularly antagonistic period in Anglo-French relations, which resulted in a dramatic increase in anti-French sentiment, with many British people seeing the French as decadent and elitist. Indeed, British national identity was largely shaped in relation to the French. As Linda Colley argues, “men and women came to define themselves as Britons … because circumstances impressed them with the belief that they were different from those beyond their shores, and in particular different from their prime enemy, the French.”³⁵ In particular, the British celebrated their loyalty, Protestantism, dominance in trade, and relatively free press, all of which they contrasted with the miseries of the enslaved and miserable Catholic French.³⁶ The dueling of the two nations was drawn out, to say the least. Their conflict was unrelenting from 1689 to 1815, and as war dragged on, anti-French sentiment only grew among the British.³⁷ Colley explains the critical factors that made France such a powerful and feared rival: “France had a larger population and a much bigger land mass than Great Britain. It was its greatest commercial and imperial rival. It possessed a more powerful army which regularly showed itself able to conquer large tracts of Europe. And it was a Catholic state.”³⁸ All this to say, there were many reasons why the English wanted to distance themselves from the French, including religious differences, competition, and warfare on a global scale.

Aside from problematic relations with the French, Georgian England also experienced growing conflict between the fashionable beau monde and the up and coming middle class. Historian Roy Porter provides a helpful framework for looking at English class structure by splitting it into seven distinct categories: the great, the rich, the middle sort, the working trades (hard labor), the country people, the poor, and the miserable.³⁹ The eighteenth century saw an expansion of the "middle sort" along with the expansion of trade and growing wealth of the nation as a whole. Members of this middle class also had a strong moral identity, rooted in a deep commitment to Protestantism. One contemporary commentator summed up the middle-class viewpoint as “every man for himself and God for all of us.”⁴⁰ Finally, this group had increasing levels of literacy, which supported a growing demand for news and greater political awareness. This access was supported by the expansion of the press (itself a middle-class occupation) following the lapse of censorship laws in the early eighteenth century. This middle class thus became increasingly aware of the activities of the beau monde, which maintained a monopoly on political power while engaging in behaviors—including indulging in expensive French fashions—that were seen by many in the middle class as decadent or corrupt.

Criticisms of immoral behavior in the fashionable elite were also heavily gendered, partly because of women’s increasing participation in the political sphere. Linda Colley provides necessary context, stating, “Female Britons were in much the same position as the majority of their male countrymen. They might well possess some property to their name. But under the existing representative system, they had no vote. This was one reason why male anxieties about female pretensions became markedly sharper in the second half of the eighteenth century.”⁴¹ For middle-class men in particular, the thought of elite women gaining access to political power while the men themselves remained excluded from that power was galling. In addition, women were active and enthusiastic participants in the expanding opportunities for sociability and consumerism during the late eighteenth century. Their increased presence was in turn deeply worrying to men who were committed to the idea that women should not engage in public life.

While all this was happening, women were physically taking up more space at court, where mantuas (some of which could be more than six feet wide) were a prerequisite for entrance. As Hannah Greig discusses, women's choices in fashion at court also had political implications that were widely recognized.⁴² Where men could make overt political statements, women could also engage with politics through dress. They thus had some access to political influence that middle-class men lacked.⁴³ Satirizing fashions as outsized and impractical simultaneously mocked elite women and dismissed their sartorial decisions as trivial and ridiculous.

Women even engaged in more direct political activity. As Colley notes,

At one and the same time, separate sexual spheres were being increasingly prescribed in theory, yet increasingly broken through in practice. The half-century after the American war would witness a marked expansion in the range of British women’s public and patriotic activities, as well as changes in how those activities were viewed and legitimised.”⁴⁴

Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire is a particularly salient example of female political influence in part because she held clout in the context of the court as well as influence over people of lower social rank.⁴⁵ Aside from being a fashion icon, Georgiana was well known for her Whig affiliations and association with the court at Leicester Square, which was overseen by the Prince of Wales and a rival to the court of King George III.⁴⁶ She was so vocal and politically active, she even did electioneering, brazenly canvassing for Charles James Fox. Georgiana took up political space in a context that Chrisman-Campbell describes as “powerful, pleasure-loving Whigs opposed to the ruling Tory party.”⁴⁷ Critics of the duchess and her political allies attacked her for her gambling debts and other ostensibly immoral behavior. For her enemies, Georgiana‘s political activities, devotion to Frenchified fashions, and immoral behavior (like her unpaid gambling debts) were all pieces of the same puzzle. In a patriarchal society, Georgiana and women like her threatened to overturn male dominance over the political realm. If satires against fashionable society were driven by xenophobia, class resentment, and sexism, women like the Duchess represented the perfect target.

Figure 21. The French Lady in London, or The Head Dress For the Year 1771.

Figure 22. Miss Prattle Consulting Doctor Double Fee About Her Pantheon Head Dress 1772 (1772).

Figure 23. The Extravaganza, or The Mountain Head Dress of 1776 (1776)

Figure 24. Lady All-Top (1776).

Figure 25. The Vis-a-Vis Bisected, or the Ladies Coop (1776).

Figure 26. Phaetona or Modern Female Taste (1776).

Figure 27. The Ladies Contrivance or the Capital Concert (1777).

Figure 28. A New Fashion'd Head Dress for Young Misses of Three Score and Ten (1777).

Figure 29. The Feather'd Fair in a Fright (1777).